What is Load Balancing in Cloud Computing?

Load balancing may also be referred to as traffic dispatching since it works as a traffic director for websites and applications. It disperses the user traffic to different servers to avoid subjecting a particular server to excessive traffic load, to ensure smooth performance and prevent crashes.

Load balancing is critical in the cloud environment and SaaS applications because the resources there are virtual and can be overloaded with traffic at times. It ensures:

• High Availability: If one server is down, the traffic is automatically redirected to other functional servers.
• Performance: To maintain application response when receiving multiple requests at once.
• Scalability: To add more servers to the pool to handle growing traffic.

Keep in Mind: All servers coordinate to handle the aggregate workload simultaneously to enhance the usability of products or services offered.

Real-world examples: Streaming platforms such as Netflix employ load balancing to deliver a seamless flow of videos to millions of users at once.

Think of it like shopping in a busy supermarket where instead of everybody queueing up at one counter, several counters are opened to divide the load. Load balancers function similarly; they distribute the current incoming requests to the least loaded server.

Some of the common load balancing techniques include the round-robin, least connections, and IP hash, each with its advantages and use cases.

Keep in mind: Load balancers may also take into account the health of the servers, response time, or geographical location of the servers.

Here are three differences: 

• Scalability: The capability to increase or decrease resources (like servers) and manage different traffic levels.
• Load Balancing: This is the act of distributing the traffic across those available resources.
• Cloud Elasticity: Includes scaling of resources automatically based on the traffic and the integration of scalability and load distribution.

Load balancing is widely used in SaaS applications to improve user satisfaction and service availability. For example:

• Microsoft Office 365: Balances traffic from millions of users accessing emails, documents, and other services.
• Zoom Video Conferencing: Distributes video or audio traffic across multiple servers to maintain the quality of communication.
• Salesforce CRM: Balances the volume of customer relationship management data and transactions for responsiveness or availability for sales teams.